The Music of the Voiceless

Javed Akthar in 2012

Octogenarian Javed Akthar, celebrated screenwriter and lyricist of Bollywood, was asked a question recently by a group of youngsters. Will art and literature have much relevance in the future? Akthar’s answer was an allegory. Millions of fish are caught every day by humans. They are skinned brutally, cut into pieces, cooked in infinitely varied ways, and savoured on dining tables all over the world. We, humans, raise our voice in defence of a lot of animals: cows, dogs, and wild animals too. But no one raises even a feeble cry of protest on behalf of the fish. Do you know why? Because the fish don’t cry. In fact, they do cry; but their cries have no voice. No one hears their cries. The fish are voiceless. The cry of the voiceless is literature. Art is the music of the voiceless. And so they will continue to be relevant as long as there are voiceless creatures on earth.

The Jews were the voiceless fish during Hitler’s march of racial triumph – six million of them. The Africans were the fish during the Transatlantic slave trade of 16^th to 19^th century –  12 million of them. 800,000 Tutsis were rendered voiceless by Hutu militias in just 100 days of the 1994 summer. Remember the 1.5 million Armenians killed by the Ottoman Empire when the World War I was killing a lot of others elsewhere? Can we forget Pol Pot and his 2 million voiceless victims? The atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Human savagery is infinite!

And it continues to present-day Palestine, Ukraine, and many other places where the media is not active for various reasons that we are not unaware of.

Human Savagery. Maggie and I are terrified to switch on our TV for breakfast news. There is not a single day when the headlines don’t scream about acts of human savagery apart from war and all sorts of terrorism: murders and rapes. Humankind has always been like this; I reflected loudly this morning in answer to Maggie’s complaint about my obsession with the breakfast news. No, she protested vehemently. The world was much better in our childhood days, she said. No, I was just two years old when China launched a surprise attack in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. Five years later, again, in Sikkim. Pakistan has been waging an endless war with us throughout our lifetime, I reminded Maggie. Then our own governments have inflicted enormous pains on the citizens in various ways: the Adivasis and Dalits and certain minority communities have been the voiceless victims again and again.

Who will sing for these voiceless fishes?

I’m reminded of Steven Galloway’s splendid novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo. [Read my review here.] Twenty-two people were killed and several others injured in a series of mortar shell attacks in Sarajevo on 27 May 1992 by Bosnian Serb forces. For the next 22 days, Vedran Smailovic, a renowned local cellist, played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor at the site in honour of the dead. Music of the voiceless. 

“The Cellist is a motif in the novel reminding us constantly of the struggle of human civilisation against savagery, hope against despair, and stoic forbearance against mindless depredation.” I wrote thus in my blog post cited above. We cannot ignore the breakfast news, dear Maggie; we can only sustain our hope for a better human civilisation, hope against despair, and exercise forbearance in the meanwhile.